It's an idiosyncracy of French law. The plaintiff here was a customer who did, yes, successfully sue for the source code. It probably couldn't happen in the US or UK.
They didn't sue to obtain the source code, and I think this would probably hold up in a U.S. court. AFPA were countersuing because the they were being invalidly sued for breach of contract. They contracted with EDU3 to provided them with certain software. EDU3 provided them with software that EDU3 had no license to distribute (because they were violating the terms of the GPL.) EDU3 also included a security backdoor that would allow them access AFPA's computers.
AFPA noted that EDU3 was providing them with counterfeit software in violation of copyright law and refused to pay them. EDU3 sued AFPA for breech of contract. AFPA counter sued. In this case the appeals judge determined that the AFPA had the right to terminate the contract without payment, and that because there was no breech of contract by AFPA the counter suit was upheld. EDU3 doesn't get paid, and EDU3 must pay AFPA's legal bills.
I would certainly hope that in the U.S. and in the U.K. that you are allowed to sue someone that provides you with counterfeit software.
Yeah, I'll probably be rated flamebait for saying that, but for me as a shareware author the GPL is reason enough not to use GPL-licenced code. That's a pitty, because there are so many useful programming libraries released under GPL instead of the more useful LGPL. Let's face it: If the source code of a shareware app is released, it'll be cloned and ripped off within days.
No, you're not spouting flamebait. You're just someone who like to make money off of other peoples' work. I believe the term is "entrepreneur" which (if taken literally) is French for burglar (one who enters and takes).
If you want to use a GPL library in your shareware, you can always contact the authors and ask if you can buy a commercial license to the code. From what I've seen of other shareware that has stolen GPL code, the GPL code is 99% of the work. If that's the case, they'll probably want 99% of the take. Google "video conversion software" and 90% of the results will contain ffmpeg without attribution or source.
The other option is that you can write your own damn libraries for use in your shareware.
You'll note I did say "on most life bearing planets." I don't rule out the possibility of other communicating civilizations in the galaxy. Even if there aren't any, I think SETI is a worthwhile endeavor, and well worth the <.000035% of GDP that we typically spend on it.
You seem to be confused about what entropy is. Entropy is merely a description of the unlikeliness of a particular arrangement of matter; it is not intrinsically linked to its heat (although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, this does not necessarily follow).
I'm very well aware about what entropy is, both as a physical and mathematical concept, and it is by definition linked to the thermodynamic concept of heat. (Actually in modern formulations of thermodynamics, heat is defined in terms of entropy rather than vice versa.) I am also well aware that the entropy decrease due to a specific of arrangement of molecules in a living organism is minimal compared to the entropy increase caused by operating at a temperature even slightly higher than ambient temperature. The math is unequivocal.
That is not to say it is in equilibrium with its environment, or that its entropy will be not be temporarily raised upon death, but merely that thermodynamic entropy more than outweighs the "orderliness" of a specific chemical arrangement. In order to claim a local entropy decrease you would need to discard most of the organism as "non-local" any only consider processes that are maintained out of thermodynamic or chemical equilibrium.
With all regards to Schroedinger, when writing for the masses scientists tend to exaggerate. Did Schroedinger really write "fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy)" or did you add the parenthetical expression? Entropy is a mathematical concept proportional (or equal, depending upon which definition you use) to the log of the number of states accessible to a system. Temperature is the rate at which the energy of a system changes as entropy is added or removed (without otherwise changing the system). "Orderliness" is not an equivalent term to entropy.
I will stipulate that if maintained at a constant temperature the entropy of an organism will increase after death. In perfect thermodynamic isolation (which is impossible), the temperature of an organism will rise after death because of this entropy increase (more precisely because of endothermic chemical processes) But the same thing would happen to a living organism. In fact, it will happen faster due to catalyzed processes and eventually the excess entropy will kill the organism.
The primary way that an organism decreases its entropy is by radiative and evaporative cooling, and excretion of high entropy material. What an organism does is takes a low entropy source (food, sunlight, oxygen) and turns it into a small amount of low entropy material (structures, chemical sequestration, chemical disequilibrium) and a large amount of high entropy material (a warm body, waste heat and waste material). If the organism itself were a region of low entropy, it would have a hard time getting rid of the waste entropy.
I have to fight with colleagues all the time to keep them from misusing a precise term in this manner. This misuse lead to people claiming that life and/or evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics. If they want to call life something that results in the organization of matter into ordered structures, that's fine, but it doesn't decrease entropy, not even locally.
Lecture over. For extra credit, please calculate the minimum amount of energy required to overwrite a perfectly efficient 1GB memory chip with random data. What was the temperature before and after the operation. Warning, this is a trick question.
The GP is wrong. The defrag program (which didn't ship with the OS) was a script did a copy+delete+rename on every file on the disk. Doing a rename on OS/2, like every other operating system, including DOS and CP/M just updates directory entries.
a self-perpetuating activity that consumes energy and results in a localised reduction of entropy,
That definition may be your favorite, but it's not true. Life doesn't even result in a localized reduction of entropy. Living organisms tend to have higher entropy than their surroundings. Thats why they give off heat. What passes for a science education these days?
You want to know what does result in a localized reduction of entropy? A refrigerator. An air conditioner. A pool of evaporating liquid. But having a temperature below the ambient, although it is possible and in fact required for many mammals in hot regions of the world, is not a general property of life.
Intelligence != rich material culture (aka "civilization").
Former is unavoidable result of evolutionary arms race while latter is a just a quirk of random and unlikely circumstances leading to its origin.
Actually, its likely that the former is also just a quirk of random and unlikely circumstances as well. Life existed for 3.5 billion years on Earth with nothing more intelligent than a single celled organism evolving. There's no reason to believe that it couldn't have gone on that way for much longer. Going from single celled to multicelled organisms was a difficult step.
You can actually do some simple math to figure out how many "difficult steps" there were in our evolution. By "difficult step" I mean one that is unlikely to be accomplished in the available time. The simplest way to estimate is to calculate what fraction of the available time for intelligence to evolve did it take intelligence to evolve. The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and what we would describe as intelligent species arose about 50 million years ago (or, in essence, now). Current estimates are that the Earth will become inhospitable to life in 0.5 to 1 billion years. So there are 5 to 5.5 billion years available for intelligent life to arise, and it took 4.5 billion years to happen. That means there are probably about 5.5/(5.5-4.5)=5.5 to 5/(5-4.5)=10 "difficult steps" in development of intelligence. That means it probably doesn't exist in any form on most life bearing planets.
In habitable places in universe, if we ever get to them, there will probably be life and if there is life there will probably be intelligent beings, like dolphins, dogs, parrots, etc. , but don't hold your breath for alien civilizations.
I wouldn't even hold your breath for multicellular organisms on most life bearing planets. An ocean full of photosynthesizing slime might be the best bet.
So under a Libertarian society, there would necessarily be no limits whatsoever on contracts? The government would enforce slavery and prostitution? I don't think so.
If slavery or prostitution were entered into willingly by the slave or the prostitute, most libertarians would say that the government has no place in hampering them. Most would also say that "willingly" includes "under the terms of a contract signed without duress."
But most would say that the children of a slave would be free persons, and that parents cannot sell their children into slavery.
I'm sure there will be some jurisdictions where bankruptcy laws trump any repossession clause in the contract.
In a libertarian society there are no laws that trump contract terms. Law only exists to enforce contracts. In a libertarian society there are no bankruptcy laws. Debts are permanent and can never be discharged without full payment or a contract between the debtor and creditor to modify the terms of payment. If a contract stated that ownership could not be transferred, then ownership can not be transferred.
One mechanic violating the contract and putting the decryption keys anonymously on the internet might also work.
Since each car would have a unique key, this could potentially deprive the mechanic of his livelihood and potentially time in the automaker's prison for revealing keys that only work on specific cars. What benefit is there to the mechanic for revealing these keys.
Yes, in a libertarian society corporations would have private jails (more likely work camps) for housing people who had violated contract terms or were indebted to them. After all, if those things were in the contract they should be legal and respected by government. Government jails would only be for criminals. But the government would probably sell criminals to the corporate work camps.
Are you saying that with the more expensive system, disks never fail and nobody ever has to get up in the night?
Essentially yes. When our primary file server was a NetApp that was on a service contract, the way were notified of a disk failure was that someone from the loading dock would come in and hand us a disk drive that arrived via overnight FedEx or a same day courier, depending upon when the failure had happened. Our job was to go to the filer, pull out the drive with the red light, and pop in the new drive (which arrived already installed in the drive tray.) The new drive would automatically become a hot spare without operator intervention.
Given infinite money, I would definitely go back to NetApp. Therein lies the rub.
It will be interesting now that we could be able to sequence your DNA and your parents' DNA, figure out exactly what mutations you have (if any) from the previous generation, and possibly know what those mutations do.
It would be very unlikely for you to have no (germ cell) mutations from the previous generation. It's fairly easy to arrive at an order of magnitude estimate of the number of mutations that are uniquely yours. I'll save you the math, but that number is about 10. Only about one in 25,000 people has no mutations of their own.
Of those 10 mutations, many are in non-coding areas of DNA and tend not to cause a problem. Some will inactivate a gene, which is why we have multiple copies of every important gene, except those on the X and Y chromosome in men. (Ever wonder why men are more susceptible to genetically linked diseases?) Some could change the structure of a protein, which may or may not be a problem depending upon whether the new protein has similar activity to the precursor, whether it has no activity, or does something harmful. Cases where a mutation will be advantageous are pretty rare.
Of course, if one of your 10 mutations were instantly fatal you never would have been born. That may be the reason that the majority of pregnancies don't even implant successfully, and of those that do, many don't last for more than a few days or weeks. Some mutations may kill you later in life, even after you reproduce. However mutations to coding regions of DNA tend to be moderately fatal and will probably get weeded out in a few generations. Your surviving great great grand children are unlikely to have any mutations to coding DNA that came from you.
And here I thought that the whole idea of "no taxation without representation" would mean something. Corporations are being taxed, but do not get to vote.
If you think corporations aren't getting representation you must not be from this planet. Yay! First Contact!
Actually, gold bricks can do more damage at impact than canned foods...
Actually canned foods are far easier to target accurately and throw at high velocity. I'll take canned good vs gold bricks at 50 feet any day. The guy with the can opener doesn't stand a chance against either of us.
I think the whole "search for killer asteroids" is fatally flawed. Let's see... the last one hit 200,000,000 years ago. The last time someone won my State lottery was just last week, and typically they hand-out ten of these multi-million dollars prizes a year, so 10 out of 4 million tickets sold.
I have about 500 times better odds of winning my State lottery, than getting killed by an asteroid.
You have a problem with your math and your numbers. Big asteroids hit about every 68 million years. If one hit tomorrow it would kill 6.8 billion people. So on average, we can expect asteroids to kill about 100 people per year. That means you are about 10 times more likely to be killed in an asteroid impact than to win the state lottery.
I'm very curious to learn which is their business plan. Could it be "pay us a gazillion dollars or we won't use our technology against the asteroid"?
Any technology that can be used to divert an asteroid away from the Earth can also be used to direct one toward the Earth. I would guess they could get venture capital for a business plan like "pay us a gazillion dollars or we will use our technology to alter the course of this asteroid."
Lots of other businesses have "destroy the Earth" in their business plan. Why should commercial space ventures be any different?
Erm, actually, an asteroid big enough to knock out a city is about 10m in diameter. We'd probably have no notice whatsoever. Of course the likelihood that it would hit a city is pretty small.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an idiosyncracy of French law. The plaintiff here was a customer who did, yes, successfully sue for the source code. It probably couldn't happen in the US or UK.
They didn't sue to obtain the source code, and I think this would probably hold up in a U.S. court. AFPA were countersuing because the they were being invalidly sued for breach of contract. They contracted with EDU3 to provided them with certain software. EDU3 provided them with software that EDU3 had no license to distribute (because they were violating the terms of the GPL.) EDU3 also included a security backdoor that would allow them access AFPA's computers.
AFPA noted that EDU3 was providing them with counterfeit software in violation of copyright law and refused to pay them. EDU3 sued AFPA for breech of contract. AFPA counter sued. In this case the appeals judge determined that the AFPA had the right to terminate the contract without payment, and that because there was no breech of contract by AFPA the counter suit was upheld. EDU3 doesn't get paid, and EDU3 must pay AFPA's legal bills.
I would certainly hope that in the U.S. and in the U.K. that you are allowed to sue someone that provides you with counterfeit software.
Yeah, I'll probably be rated flamebait for saying that, but for me as a shareware author the GPL is reason enough not to use GPL-licenced code. That's a pitty, because there are so many useful programming libraries released under GPL instead of the more useful LGPL. Let's face it: If the source code of a shareware app is released, it'll be cloned and ripped off within days.
No, you're not spouting flamebait. You're just someone who like to make money off of other peoples' work. I believe the term is "entrepreneur" which (if taken literally) is French for burglar (one who enters and takes).
If you want to use a GPL library in your shareware, you can always contact the authors and ask if you can buy a commercial license to the code. From what I've seen of other shareware that has stolen GPL code, the GPL code is 99% of the work. If that's the case, they'll probably want 99% of the take. Google "video conversion software" and 90% of the results will contain ffmpeg without attribution or source.
The other option is that you can write your own damn libraries for use in your shareware.
The GPL says quite plainly that it must be the source code used to compile the binary (not patches or diffs) and in machine readable format.
Target, Citibank, and Visa don't have the power to put me in prison for one....
If any of the above (or a few hundred other corporations) wanted you in prison, to prison you would go.
You'll note I did say "on most life bearing planets." I don't rule out the possibility of other communicating civilizations in the galaxy. Even if there aren't any, I think SETI is a worthwhile endeavor, and well worth the <.000035% of GDP that we typically spend on it.
You seem to be confused about what entropy is. Entropy is merely a description of the unlikeliness of a particular arrangement of matter; it is not intrinsically linked to its heat (although hotter items tend to have higher entropy, this does not necessarily follow).
I'm very well aware about what entropy is, both as a physical and mathematical concept, and it is by definition linked to the thermodynamic concept of heat. (Actually in modern formulations of thermodynamics, heat is defined in terms of entropy rather than vice versa.) I am also well aware that the entropy decrease due to a specific of arrangement of molecules in a living organism is minimal compared to the entropy increase caused by operating at a temperature even slightly higher than ambient temperature. The math is unequivocal.
That is not to say it is in equilibrium with its environment, or that its entropy will be not be temporarily raised upon death, but merely that thermodynamic entropy more than outweighs the "orderliness" of a specific chemical arrangement. In order to claim a local entropy decrease you would need to discard most of the organism as "non-local" any only consider processes that are maintained out of thermodynamic or chemical equilibrium.
With all regards to Schroedinger, when writing for the masses scientists tend to exaggerate. Did Schroedinger really write "fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy)" or did you add the parenthetical expression? Entropy is a mathematical concept proportional (or equal, depending upon which definition you use) to the log of the number of states accessible to a system. Temperature is the rate at which the energy of a system changes as entropy is added or removed (without otherwise changing the system). "Orderliness" is not an equivalent term to entropy.
I will stipulate that if maintained at a constant temperature the entropy of an organism will increase after death. In perfect thermodynamic isolation (which is impossible), the temperature of an organism will rise after death because of this entropy increase (more precisely because of endothermic chemical processes) But the same thing would happen to a living organism. In fact, it will happen faster due to catalyzed processes and eventually the excess entropy will kill the organism.
The primary way that an organism decreases its entropy is by radiative and evaporative cooling, and excretion of high entropy material. What an organism does is takes a low entropy source (food, sunlight, oxygen) and turns it into a small amount of low entropy material (structures, chemical sequestration, chemical disequilibrium) and a large amount of high entropy material (a warm body, waste heat and waste material). If the organism itself were a region of low entropy, it would have a hard time getting rid of the waste entropy.
I have to fight with colleagues all the time to keep them from misusing a precise term in this manner. This misuse lead to people claiming that life and/or evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics. If they want to call life something that results in the organization of matter into ordered structures, that's fine, but it doesn't decrease entropy, not even locally.
Lecture over. For extra credit, please calculate the minimum amount of energy required to overwrite a perfectly efficient 1GB memory chip with random data. What was the temperature before and after the operation. Warning, this is a trick question.
The GP is wrong. The defrag program (which didn't ship with the OS) was a script did a copy+delete+rename on every file on the disk. Doing a rename on OS/2, like every other operating system, including DOS and CP/M just updates directory entries.
a self-perpetuating activity that consumes energy and results in a localised reduction of entropy,
That definition may be your favorite, but it's not true. Life doesn't even result in a localized reduction of entropy. Living organisms tend to have higher entropy than their surroundings. Thats why they give off heat. What passes for a science education these days?
You want to know what does result in a localized reduction of entropy? A refrigerator. An air conditioner. A pool of evaporating liquid. But having a temperature below the ambient, although it is possible and in fact required for many mammals in hot regions of the world, is not a general property of life.
Intelligence != rich material culture (aka "civilization").
Former is unavoidable result of evolutionary arms race while latter is a just a quirk of random and unlikely circumstances leading to its origin.
Actually, its likely that the former is also just a quirk of random and unlikely circumstances as well. Life existed for 3.5 billion years on Earth with nothing more intelligent than a single celled organism evolving. There's no reason to believe that it couldn't have gone on that way for much longer. Going from single celled to multicelled organisms was a difficult step.
You can actually do some simple math to figure out how many "difficult steps" there were in our evolution. By "difficult step" I mean one that is unlikely to be accomplished in the available time. The simplest way to estimate is to calculate what fraction of the available time for intelligence to evolve did it take intelligence to evolve. The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and what we would describe as intelligent species arose about 50 million years ago (or, in essence, now). Current estimates are that the Earth will become inhospitable to life in 0.5 to 1 billion years. So there are 5 to 5.5 billion years available for intelligent life to arise, and it took 4.5 billion years to happen. That means there are probably about 5.5/(5.5-4.5)=5.5 to 5/(5-4.5)=10 "difficult steps" in development of intelligence. That means it probably doesn't exist in any form on most life bearing planets.
In habitable places in universe, if we ever get to them, there will probably be life and if there is life there will probably be intelligent beings, like dolphins, dogs, parrots, etc. , but don't hold your breath for alien civilizations.
I wouldn't even hold your breath for multicellular organisms on most life bearing planets. An ocean full of photosynthesizing slime might be the best bet.
It is called greed, and it is fully endorsed by everyone who has something they want to protect.
Unless, of course, that something is the health and well-being of your fellow citizens. Doing that would be contrary to the dictates of greed.
So under a Libertarian society, there would necessarily be no limits whatsoever on contracts? The government would enforce slavery and prostitution? I don't think so.
If slavery or prostitution were entered into willingly by the slave or the prostitute, most libertarians would say that the government has no place in hampering them. Most would also say that "willingly" includes "under the terms of a contract signed without duress."
But most would say that the children of a slave would be free persons, and that parents cannot sell their children into slavery.
I'm sure there will be some jurisdictions where bankruptcy laws trump any repossession clause in the contract.
In a libertarian society there are no laws that trump contract terms. Law only exists to enforce contracts. In a libertarian society there are no bankruptcy laws. Debts are permanent and can never be discharged without full payment or a contract between the debtor and creditor to modify the terms of payment. If a contract stated that ownership could not be transferred, then ownership can not be transferred.
One mechanic violating the contract and putting the decryption keys anonymously on the internet might also work.
Since each car would have a unique key, this could potentially deprive the mechanic of his livelihood and potentially time in the automaker's prison for revealing keys that only work on specific cars. What benefit is there to the mechanic for revealing these keys.
Yes, in a libertarian society corporations would have private jails (more likely work camps) for housing people who had violated contract terms or were indebted to them. After all, if those things were in the contract they should be legal and respected by government. Government jails would only be for criminals. But the government would probably sell criminals to the corporate work camps.
Ahh, Utopia! I can see it now!
Yes, but would those applications be any different than they were the last time someone did this exact same thing?
That doesn't count as "free as in beer" in my book.
Are you saying that with the more expensive system, disks never fail and nobody ever has to get up in the night?
Essentially yes. When our primary file server was a NetApp that was on a service contract, the way were notified of a disk failure was that someone from the loading dock would come in and hand us a disk drive that arrived via overnight FedEx or a same day courier, depending upon when the failure had happened. Our job was to go to the filer, pull out the drive with the red light, and pop in the new drive (which arrived already installed in the drive tray.) The new drive would automatically become a hot spare without operator intervention.
Given infinite money, I would definitely go back to NetApp. Therein lies the rub.
Guess I should have read TFS. I guess I'm a factor of 10 low. The rest still goes, though. ;)
It will be interesting now that we could be able to sequence your DNA and your parents' DNA, figure out exactly what mutations you have (if any) from the previous generation, and possibly know what those mutations do.
It would be very unlikely for you to have no (germ cell) mutations from the previous generation. It's fairly easy to arrive at an order of magnitude estimate of the number of mutations that are uniquely yours. I'll save you the math, but that number is about 10. Only about one in 25,000 people has no mutations of their own.
Of those 10 mutations, many are in non-coding areas of DNA and tend not to cause a problem. Some will inactivate a gene, which is why we have multiple copies of every important gene, except those on the X and Y chromosome in men. (Ever wonder why men are more susceptible to genetically linked diseases?) Some could change the structure of a protein, which may or may not be a problem depending upon whether the new protein has similar activity to the precursor, whether it has no activity, or does something harmful. Cases where a mutation will be advantageous are pretty rare.
Of course, if one of your 10 mutations were instantly fatal you never would have been born. That may be the reason that the majority of pregnancies don't even implant successfully, and of those that do, many don't last for more than a few days or weeks. Some mutations may kill you later in life, even after you reproduce. However mutations to coding regions of DNA tend to be moderately fatal and will probably get weeded out in a few generations. Your surviving great great grand children are unlikely to have any mutations to coding DNA that came from you.
In the U.S. the person who makes the gift pays the gift tax, not the recipient. Gifts are also taxed at different rates than income.
And here I thought that the whole idea of "no taxation without representation" would mean something. Corporations are being taxed, but do not get to vote.
If you think corporations aren't getting representation you must not be from this planet. Yay! First Contact!
And today, for instance, I was alerted to another situation by the angry cursing of my girlfriend as she attempted to log into her account.
How you can tell when a slashdotter is lying. A 6 digit ID and he claims to have a girlfriend.
Actually, gold bricks can do more damage at impact than canned foods ...
Actually canned foods are far easier to target accurately and throw at high velocity. I'll take canned good vs gold bricks at 50 feet any day. The guy with the can opener doesn't stand a chance against either of us.
It was the lack of money that caused the lack of spending, not the lack of things to buy.
The lack of money is just as imaginary as the abundance of money that preceded it.
No. I don't know if I'm being funny or not. Why do you ask?
I think the whole "search for killer asteroids" is fatally flawed. Let's see... the last one hit 200,000,000 years ago. The last time someone won my State lottery was just last week, and typically they hand-out ten of these multi-million dollars prizes a year, so 10 out of 4 million tickets sold.
I have about 500 times better odds of winning my State lottery, than getting killed by an asteroid.
You have a problem with your math and your numbers. Big asteroids hit about every 68 million years. If one hit tomorrow it would kill 6.8 billion people. So on average, we can expect asteroids to kill about 100 people per year. That means you are about 10 times more likely to be killed in an asteroid impact than to win the state lottery.
I'm very curious to learn which is their business plan. Could it be "pay us a gazillion dollars or we won't use our technology against the asteroid"?
Any technology that can be used to divert an asteroid away from the Earth can also be used to direct one toward the Earth. I would guess they could get venture capital for a business plan like "pay us a gazillion dollars or we will use our technology to alter the course of this asteroid."
Lots of other businesses have "destroy the Earth" in their business plan. Why should commercial space ventures be any different?
Erm, actually, an asteroid big enough to knock out a city is about 10m in diameter. We'd probably have no notice whatsoever. Of course the likelihood that it would hit a city is pretty small.